Printed Electronics World has placed the discovery of two-dimensional hematene, extracted from common iron ore, among its “Most Significant Material Science News of 2018.” The 3-atom-thick material, first detailed in Nature Nanotechnology, was created by an international team co-led by Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, and is touted as a possible photocatalyst for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and as an ultrathin magnetic material for spintronic devices. Rice researchers Aravind Puthirath Balan, Sruthi Radhakrishnan, Amey Apte, Carlos de los Reyes, Vidya Kochat, Robert Vajtai, Angel Martí and Gelu Costin and Rice alumnus Chandra Sekhar Tiwary contributed to the research.

Troy Schaum, an associate professor of architecture, has won the 2018 Architect’s Newspaper Building of the Year Award, its top Best of Design Award, for his design of the Transart Foundation in Houston. In honoring his firm, SCHAUM/SHIEH, the publication wrote the “relatively small but mighty building employs punched-through balconies and a blurred program to utilize the space to maximum effect.” The building, chosen from among 800 North American entries, also won the newspaper’s Best of Design Award for Cultural Building. The multidisciplinary art practice and foundation partially grew out of a 1997 collaboration through Rice’s Department of Anthropology by Transart founder and artist Surpik Angelini.